*

**

In a clever demonstration of the power of collaboration and online communities, Don Tapscott, author of The Digital Economy and Growing Up Digital, along with co-author Anthony Williams, decided to use a wiki to let multiple contributors help “write” a chapter for their new book Wikinomics.

The home page for the wiki, which runs on SocialText’s platform, suggests Wikinomics is "the first peer-produced guide to business in the twenty-first century," and notes "this experiment in mass collaboration runs on a wiki, the same collaborative software that powers Wikipedia. Just like Wikipedia, you have the power to add or edit entries, discuss your views, or simply read what others have written." (Although Wikipedia runs on MediaWiki)

"This is a great example of how a book can be augmented with a wiki, as most books are out of date by the time they are published, never quite finished and have the potential for participation. Last month we helped Larry Lessig share the entire Code 2.0 book in a wiki. I expect that soon such commons-peer production, a wiki for every book, will be common."

Perhaps there will be a wiki for every book, but this begs the question, "who needs the book?" If the wiki is effective, might there be no need for traditional authors, at least for non-fiction works? Will we see the title "author" replaced by new media titles like "community steward" or "collaboration guide?"

And what happens if we put a thousand monkeys in a room with a wiki ... ?

From InfoWorld, an interesting but not surprising study
from Accenture:

“In a survey of 1,000
middle managers at large companies in the U.S. and U.K., Accenture found that
managers spend as long as two hours a day searching for information and more
than half of the data they find has no value to them.”

But wait, isn’t “search” old news? Think about all we’ve read over the last
couple of years about desktop search, centralizing information, new forms of
collaboration. Then read:

* “Fifty-seven percent
of those polled said that having to go to numerous sources to collect
information makes managing data difficult.”

* “Forty percent of
respondents said that other parts of their companies aren't willing to share
information.”

* “Only 16 percent of
managers said they store valuable data in a collaborative workplace, like an
intranet portal.”

* “Just less than half
– 42 percent – of those surveyed said that they accidentally use the wrong
information at least once a week.”

It just goes to show that writing about a technology, even
writing a lot about it, and even having all sorts of predictions about how it
will take the world by storm, doesn’t mean that companies are implementing
it. And even if they implement it,
there’s no guarantee users will adopt it.

As we work through this latest prediction season, and as new
(and often truly useful) technologies are unleashed, let’s keep in mind that
many of us are early adopters, or at least early wannabe adopters, or early
adopters in assessment, and that the rest of the world is just trying to make
it through the day without falling too much further behind.

“If we give away the
bandwidth and the storage, and we get none of the advertising revenue, what's
the business model? Well, I don't know yet.”

Wika just received additional funding from Amazon.com Inc.,
and I wonder how the investors are responding to the comment. But if it’s experiments
we want, then this is a good one. It’s an opportunity for individuals or small
groups who otherwise couldn’t to launch a content venture that might make some
money and get some notoriety. It will be
interesting to watch the adoption here. How much value? How much noise? And will a sustainable business model follow?

The following article ran last week at Global PR Week 2.0. Again, if you want to join the groupbytes wiki, send me an email at giovanni at eastwick dot com. We'll be in a password-protected environment in the early stages, but going public soon.

G r o u p b y t e s

Digital/social rules for the post-Google Economy

…Technology and business leaders are now importing offline social rules into online environments. The winners will be those who best understand those rules, because the rules will influence all markets - online and offline. But how can we all get smarter?

It was a little less than a year ago that I began life as a PR blogger. I was, admittedly, a bit late to the game, and I quickly discovered that I had numerous peers in the blogosphere who had been plugging away for months (if not years), building quite a respectable online repository of insights, data and wisdom on new media. But my first glimpse into the world of PR blogging made a strong and formative impression: I understood that the endgame for all these vast and distributed experiments is collaboration, and this hunch - right or wrong - almost instantly shaped the approach I asked my agency to adopt. Since then we've been advising clients on how they can use new media to extend their market reach though online collaboration with their customers, partners and influencers.

Today we are launching a new collaborative project, but of a very different kind. With the help of the PR blogger community - which is showing up in full force at Global PR Blog Week 2.0 - we hope to begin capturing the rules, lessons and best practices that the PR industry is learning as it continues helping organizations to build online communities. We're launching a wiki, linking from the eastwikkers group blog, where we're inviting anyone and everyone from the business community to help us define and understand the rules that govern online behavior. Our earliest experiences in community-building taught us that, indeed, rules exist. And we're beginning the dialog here, by proposing twelve of these rules, which we are calling "groupbytes" because of the digital environment in which these rules are being tested, and because they are bite-sized and easy to digest (the key to new-media communication). More about that in a bit. First, a word about how we're approaching the project.

How we got here (the online world)

As a technology PR agency, based in Silicon Valley, we felt it was critical to place new media in an historical context. We'll post a great deal more on this subject on the wiki as the conversation gets going. In the meantime, we're offering this simple (perhaps simplistic) hypothesis about the evolution of new-media tools.

The three waves

the great migration

the socialization of the Web

back to the Old World

To understand the power and force of new media, it's important to appreciate what came before it. From our perspective, the most important driver and antecedent for new media is search, for this one technology alone has recruited many millions of people to go online for their many information needs. Granted, other technologies have helped to create the very large online population that exists today. But search is the dominant driver for the huge wave of recruitment we're calling "the great migration."

The second wave is where most of us - the PR bloggers reviewing this short paper - live. We're calling this "the socialization of the Web." In part, this socialization is a reaction, for one of the defining attributes of the first wave is that many people who have migrated to the Web for their many information needs have abandoned - willfully or inadvertently - offline communities. This has created both a crisis and opportunity for business and technology leaders. The groupbytes below are a distillation of the social rules that technology leaders have been importing or that have naturally arisen in a very large online experiment that's underway. Which leads to the controlling idea of this paper, and our wiki: technology and business leaders are now importing offline social rules into online environments. The winners will be those who best understand those rules, because the rules will influence all markets - online and offline. But how can we all get smarter?

Finally, we expect the lessons from the second wave to dramatically influence the third: the offline world's eventual adoption of lessons from the online world. This is already happening (the three waves are not exactly sequential), and it is one reason that the rules should matter to everyone, whether they are sold on the idea that they should have a new-media strategy. It's also the reason why we've chosen the New World/Old World metaphor to illustrate some of our thinking: as we'll see in the groupbytes below, the social experiments that are happening online are some of the most innovative experiments in representative governance, just as the New World provided an environment for testing some of the most radical notions from the Old World (nod to the Scottish Philosophers who influenced the intellectual U.S. Colonials), and later exported their findings to anyone in the Old World who cared to listen.

But one more pause before we start: the digital world is different. The reason we're calling this paper "groupbytes" - as opposed to the simpler "grouprules," or the snappier "groupwise" (which happens to be the name of a well-known collaboration tool) is that we felt it's important to remind everyone of the environment in which these rules are being tested. As many practitioners of new media know, certain social rules in the digital world thrive and flourish, while others could not have originated in any other environment; on the whole, the digital world is more inclusive, open and efficient. We believe this will have a dramatic effect on some markets - e.g., politics - where very few organizations have developed the strategies for being more open, inclusive and efficient. We've been surprised with the many market innovations/disruptions that many organizations have made - most notably, the Wikimedia Foundation - but our gut tells us that we ain't seen nothing yet.

As we have said, it's important to remember that the "waves" are not quite sequential, even though we can be certain that the third wave (Old World adoption) is just beginning to rise. And one thing we're noticing is that many of the giants from the first wave are the giants and innovators in the second wave. Still, there are others. But to simplify, we believe that the technology innovators to watch - the companies that will influence those who will follow - are market leaders or innovators in search and e-commerce. In fact, the innovators in online communities seem to have taken best practices from each of these worlds and combined them with the simplicity, low-cost and ease-of-use of new media. True, these attributes of the new-media toolset - simplicity, low-cost and ease-of-use - have made the development of online communities sure and swift. But new media is driven by the force that has made the leaders in search and e-commerce so forbidding. It is the force of the people.

Groupbytes

Here are twelve easy rules we've learned in our own work and in conversations with our peers. Many of these rules will be familiar to PR bloggers, but there should be one or two surprises for novices and experts alike.

Twelve: be inclusive

Many bloggers recognize this as the "rule of participation." In fact, it's one of the fundamental rules of new media, and you only ignore it at your peril. The PR precinct of the blogosphere was quick to organize around this principle, and it has punished newcomers for shutting down communication with unwanted or filtered visitors. This may not be the norm in every market — we are all becoming more lenient — but in the PR world, this has almost become the cardinal rule. Note: early corporate bloggers got extra credit for providing a free-and-open online forum for customers. And there were a few surprises from the world of brick-and-mortar. Our wiki will track the companies who improvise and innovate with this rule.

Eleven: be open

PR bloggers know this as the rule of transparency. "Conversations" - the preferred form of communication in our world - have forced businesses that blog to be more transparent. A few companies that proactively have embraced this rule have dramatically altered their brand. Again, there were surprises. A company that had earned a bad reputation with the public quickly and dramatically altered its identity with the help of an open, honest blogger with a human face. Our wiki will attempt to track others that follow and innovate.

Another reason to embrace rule eleven: among the many ways the Web is beginning to socialize is with what some folks are calling "reputation systems." New leaders in business will look at how to incorporate tools such as ratings and rankings to build trust for the content they provide.

Ten: Be purposeful with your technology

Many organizations have stumbled in their online experiments by providing the wrong tools for the wrong audience (cf. the L.A. Times and their failed experiment with "the wikitorial," with the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and their success with a different approach). The rule here is to know your audience, and provide them the right tools, and the right policies, for what you need it to do. For mixed groups of people - with mixed goals and purpose - provide the right mix of tools. (e.g. Yahoo!, which boasts numerous new-media tools and environments for its heterogeneous crowd of visitors; and eBay, which very recently stunned the business world by paying a very large sum to add Skype to its technology toolkit).

Eight: Don't be groupwise/self-foolish

The best online communities - which integrate a number of new-media tools - understand how to appeal to self-interest and community. Early experiments have engaged with young audiences, but other experiments will follow. The important thing to keep in mind when building a community is to understand the motivation of your constituents, and meet their needs. As the story goes, Craigslist began as a simple resource for friends looking for jobs, apartments and furnishings. That small circle of friends has grown into a large, market-disruptive community.

This is another efficiency rule. Organizations are learning to sell more "inventory" by providing online environments that better match buyers and sellers for niche products (the biggest success to date: Google Adwords, the financial engine of the company's spectacular growth). The same applies to conversations.

Five: Use community to build consensus

A group can scale by bridging the gaps - the differences that splinter and hurt groups, New media can also be used to mobilize communities to work on projects that build consensus for the common good. This is particularly interesting in organizations that have struggled for consensus.

Four: Integrate the offline community into the technology. We're calling this the "Reeses Rule" (80's commercial: "your peanut butter is in my chocolate … your chocolate is in my peanut butter)"

Search companies are experimenting with approaches that provide the wisdom of crowds in the technology itself. Make way for companies that provide guided search and collaborative search (Note: Healthline and Groxis are clients).

Three: integrate the technology into the offline community (the Reeses Rule, part II)

In the past few months, we've seen new technology offerings that are essentially integrating technology into the physical social world. First we got Google maps — the satellite edition, which literally enables Google to crawl the earth (we've always wondered if this was, in part, a PR move, signaling the direction for this company in a most surprising way). And now we're hearing about tech companies that are helping parents to locate and monitor their teens. And, as Jupiter's Gary Stein writes in his blog, Google is beginning to experiment with ways to apply its ad-serving technology — the financial engine of its incredible growth — to the print world.

Two: replicate the entire ideal social structure online … if you can

The next wave of innovation will come from online organizations that are attempting to replicate ideal social structures that may or may not exist in the offline world. The first experiments will occur in markets that are highly fragmented and inefficient (e.g., health care, education, government).

One: Because we are playing in a social world, aim for the big social causes … if you can.

Businesses, non-profits and governments will compete for the privilege of solving the most challenging social issues and concerns. The impact on the private and public sectors will be transformative.

Conclusion

We'll be on our wiki, looking for your edits and comments. But most of all, we look forward to you additions. There are many more groupbytes yet to be identified, and with the wisdom of this particular crowd, we can learn how to put them to practice.

Want to learn and share best practices in collaboration and new media? Think you've got what it takes, or just simply curious to learn how a wiki works? We're inviting leaders in the business, non-profit, and government community to take part in a small experiment on the eastwiki (powered by Socialtext) -- a project we are calling "groupbytes." For background on this project, go to the Global PR Blog Week site where we are presenting a paper today. If you want to sign up, send me an email at giovanni at eastwick dot com.

Worth checking out. This is an annual event (now in its 2.0 edition :)), featuring online conversations about new media with PR folks all over the world. Several dozen bloggers are contributing articles for discussion (I am one of them), on a wide range of topics. Some very smart stuff was posted today, the first day of the conference. Among my favorites: Elizabeth's Albrycht's piece, "Blogs: Foundational Tools for Network Building." Very close to the topic I'm presenting tomorrow. Networked minds think alike.

Check out David Weinberger's post on Philipp Blom's Enlightening the World, a recent book about the 18th century Encyclopedie. Weinberger laments that Wikipedia's commitment to a neutral voice of view gets in the way of style, one of several things that distinguished the French project. He concludes, "I guess that's the price we pay for Wikipedia's approximation of neutrality." We agree -- and we agree it's a price worth paying for Wikipedia -- but something else may be at work here. Is is really possible to write anything witty by committee? The thing about style: the individual voice.

Check out this entertaining and thorough look at the collaboration craze, in the 6/20 issue of Business Week. Covers almost everything we've been obsessing about here at Eastwick, from group blogs and wikis, to smart mobs, dumb mobs and the "wisdom of crowds." Things are going to get even more interesting in the enterprise, as businesses learn to integrate new media tools into existing knowledge-management systems (so predicts Gartner).

What's driving all this togetherness? More than anything, an emerging generation of Net technologies. They include file-sharing, blogs, group-edited sites called wikis, and social networking services such as MySpace and Meetup Inc., which has helped everyone from Howard Deaniacs to English bulldog owners in New York form local groups. Those technologies are finally teasing out the Net's unique potential in a way that neither e-mail nor traditional Web sites did. The Net can, like no other medium, connect many people with many others at the same time.